→ 004 | action | OTA

[cactusy]

WHO: Sameen Shaw and OPEN
WHERE: Around Temba
WHAT: Fite fite fite
WHEN: Throughout the zombie event
WARNINGS: Zombies/zombie-killing, violence, mild gore

For the umpteenth time since arriving here, Shaw really, really, really wishes she had her gun. Not just a gun, her gun. The tech-heavy energy-based doodads that the Agrii provide are pretty cool, but more as a novelty than anything else, and they're unreliable as hell when the energy storms hit. When she needs a weapon, she wants old-school dependability and familiarity. Which is why she's currently running around the city, fighting off zombies with a metal pipe.

The same people seem to crop up for her, over and over again: a tall brunette woman, a guy in a suit, another guy in a suit. A man in military tactical gear. A man with the same U.S.M.C. tattoo on his forearm that she has on her own. A Middle Eastern woman who shares her facial features. One after the other, she dispatches them all, knocking them down and bashing their heads in always without hesitation, and always with the same stony look on her face. Totally normal behavior! She's fine.

As she works her way through the city, she'll be on the lookout for anyone who might need help: particularly if they're young, scared, or come off as a non-combatant, but also if they're fellow fighters who look like they could use an extra hand. And if anyone seems to be hesitating to kill zombie versions of their own loved ones... welp. For better or for worse, she'll dive right in and do it herself. It needs to be done, as far as she's concerned - regardless of whether the reaction is relief and gratitude, or horror and anger.

[OOC: I'm down for pretty much anything here: co-fighting, getting cornered/overrun, rescuing/being rescued, the works! When it comes to bites, she'll be incorrectly assuming that these zombies are likely to follow traditional zombie rules, so she'll advocate heavily for restraint/isolation/observation for anyone who's bitten, including herself.]

Comments

[thelastechidna]

Knuckles is very occupied fighting zombies. Instead of hesitating when they look like his friends, he attacks them with all the more fury! He's enraged that these things are impersonating his loved ones. When Shaw finds him, he's been ganged up on and probably could use a hand! He's currently pounding down several Sonic zombies.

"Take that! And that!"

Another is coming up on him from behind.

[cactusy]

Like meets like, even if her anger is cold and hard rather than explosive. She's just finished cutting down another zombie Finch, its glasses flying off its face as she bashes its head in, and without missing a beat she spins around and smacks her pole into the approaching Sonic.

"Head's up, there's on the ground behind you," she calls out - not wanting Knuckles to trip over the body, or stumble into it and get himself bitten.

[thelastechidna]

Knuckles spins around and attacks the new zombie. "Thanks," he says as it falls. "They just keep coming!" He snarls.

[cactusy]

"No kidding," she mutters - expression hard, grip white-knuckle tight on her pole. "You know there are people fortifying the underground, right?"

She wouldn't blame him if he's decided to fight it out on the streets rather than hunkering down and waiting this out, but she figures that everyone should know what their options are.

[thelastechidna]

"Yeah, I know," Knuckles says. "I already spent way too much time underground during that other crisis."

He might go down sometimes, but he can't see himself staying there all the time. He wants to take out his frustrations and anger on these things.

[cactusy]

It's telling that she has to ask this, but--

"Which one?"

[thelastechidna]

"When the volcano erupted just when I got here," Knuckles says.

[thepurpleone]

One might say that it's situations like these that make people appreciate the things they would normally take for granted. Donnie for one never takes his tech for granted, not when it's all he has sometimes. It makes storms such as these extra upsetting, cutting him off not only from his newly found mystic link to his brother, but from working his precious tech. It makes keeping in touch with people so much more difficult, of course now when he needed it rather than tried avoiding doing so.

He's been looking for Leo. It seems to be laughably easy to get them separated, but when you're suddenly faced with zombie hordes, it gets hard to keep track of things, especially when being cut off from your ninpō leaves you feeling quite discombobulated. But he's found his figurative footing and he has a plan, a plan that unfortunately hasn't yet produced results, but he's keeping at it.

Donnie's not looking for fights. He keeps to the rooftops when he can, a familiar route but limited for the spans of distance in which there simply aren't any rooftops to cross, forcing him to be on the ground again. But he knows how to move quietly and keep to the shadows as he makes his way through the southwestern corner of the city.

But just because he's trying to avoid zombies doesn't mean he's going to abandon someone who may be engaged with them, and although he knows Shaw enough to figure she's got it handled, it doesn't keep him from jumping in- literally. He drops down from a rooftop, perhaps a feat in itself for how easy he makes the landing look, but he's moving quickly the moment his feet are on the ground, rising with a spin of his tech-bō to catch the nearest zombie in the back of the head before he pulls back and jabs it behind him in a reverse thrust to strike another in the gut before he turns and follows up with a vicious upswing before bringing it back down again to practically smash its head into the ground.

[cactusy]

The zombie Root goes down hard when he hits her - hits it. In her peripheral vision, Shaw sees the movement of it more than she sees what actually happens, but the sickening crack of a shattering skill tells her enough. She's too preoccupied with a zombie Reese to dwell on it. That's a blessing, probably.

Reese's body follows soon after, as she cracks her pipe against its head and sends it tumbling down onto the other zombie, fishing off with a single kick to each of them, just to make sure that they're really not moving.

"Thanks," she says, belatedly. "There's no way that's gonna be all of them, though; they keep coming."

...ohmygosh that last sentence was horrible why do people let me write

[thepurpleone]

"Can't fight them all off. I've been trying to avoid them, mostly," Donnie says, glancing over at her once he's sure nothing's about to jump out at them.

"You okay?"

i thought it was fine!

[cactusy]

"Sure," she says, though it has the air of an automatic response; the kind that just means I'm up and walking, aren't I; that's enough. The Reese zombie twitches - big guys are always harder to take down, even in zombie form - and she gives his head another good hit.

"What about you? Where's your brother?"

I really should've broken it up XD;

[thepurpleone]

The turtle tries to hide a grimace at that, whirling instead to keep zombies off of them. He recognizes some of them from Shaw's memories, belated realizations that he figures shouldn't be a surprise at all. It's not like he hadn't spotted a few familiar faces in the crowds of slavering undead.

"-still looking for him," he says, tone clipped as he rams his staff into a zombie gut.

run-on sentences contribute to a sense of frantic urgency!

[cactusy]

Shaw swears under her breath, knocking the glasses off of a zombie Finch before cracking his skull.

"Want an assist?"

[work_wife]

Well, at least there might be a reason for her to come upon one particular person doing their best in this mess. If nothing else, Robin believes in fire bombs to solve problems. So yeah, shattering glass sounds, the whomph of flames overtaking an accelerant, and a ragged sounding whoop of triumph.

All of it points to Robin Buckley, finally making her way away from one secure place to somewhere she's only heard tell of. At her side hangs a big bag filled with bottles with cloth sticking out of them. Clearly she's going to get yelled at by someone later for using alcohol for weapons for the second October in a row.

But she doesn't much care about that so much as surviving. But she's probably going to need help getting through it all. There's only so much alcohol after all.

[cactusy]

If someone's going to be yelling, it certainly won't be Shaw - firebombs as a problem-solver sounds like a pretty sweet deal to her. Pole still in hand, she hustles over to Robin, ready to smack aside any zombies that come their way.

"Hey, you need more of those bottles? 'Cause I saw a bunch in an empty building a few days ago. Some of them were even unbroken."

[work_wife]

Shaw. Of course it's Shaw. Not for the first time Robin's relieved by the woman's presence. It helps a lot to know that the woman, competent and ready to fight, is at her side.

"Bottles are only useful if they're already filled with flammable liquid," Robin says with a shrug. "People get mad when I steal from the bar for this. But it's needed, you know?"

Survival is more important than getting wasted.

[cactusy]

"I love alcohol as much as anyone, but I love killing zombies before they can attack anyone even more," Shaw says. She's fully with you on this one, Robin, even if the idea of navigating this place without a reliable alcohol supply is a sucky one.

"You wanna break in and get some more? You can pin it all on me if you want."

[work_wife]

That's a really fair point. God, this lady is almost as badass as Joyce or that Jane girl is supposed to be.

"Oh I definitely want that. But it's a good distance away and I can't get there on my own."

If Robin's certain of one thing (and she's certain of more than one thing), she isn't strong enough to make that trip on her own again.

[cactusy]

"Wasn't planning on asking you to."

As cool as the bottle rockets are, this girl doesn't strike her as a fighter - at least, not in a soldier-y way. Makeshift occasionally-forced-into-it-due-to-harrowing-circumstances at best. A zombie Root comes lurching towards them, her loose hair swinging in the breeze and her normally-vibrant eyes glassy and lifeless. Shaw grits her teeth, tightens her grip on her pole, and heads for her. Killing it should feel wrong, after how long she'd held out during the simulations, but it doesn't. It feels... not satisfying, not quite, but definitely right.

[tempredmental]

Well, if anything, Shaw's stoney-faced reaction to seeing zombies of her people shows Keith that she has a strong sense of reality - that she understands what's happening and that these apparitions aren't actually the people from her world that she might have feelings about.

That was perfectly healthy... wasn't it?

It was, at least, what he was trying to do as well, but there was one particular face that, when it came to him as a zombie, was still just enough to get him to stumble and falter.

His father. A man who had actually been dead now for more than half of Keith's life. And, as they ended up fighting near each other in this moment, Shaw would see Keith stop and hesitate as he spotted the man in question.

Honestly, Keith had seen him and 'killed' him a few times already since the zombies started this time. But it still caught him off guard every time...

[cactusy]

Shaw - who still sometimes doubts the validity of this place as a whole; who still sometimes wonders if she's strapped down to a bed in a Decima facility, VR goggles on her face and a new life being beamed directly into her brain - would be pleased if she knew that anyone was seeing her as someone with a strong grip on reality. Fake it 'till you make it, or something like that.

Luckily, it's always easier to tell when something's definitely fake than it is to tell when something definitely isn't, and these shambling, brainless creatures? Aren't her teammates. The one that guy (she'd never gotten around to asking his name) is fighting definitely isn't whoever he's supposed to look like, either, so she doesn't hesitate: when she sees Keith pause, she charges over, swinging her pipe towards the zombie's head.

[tempredmental]

He snapped out of it again as he saw the woman make her move, but he also made no attempt to stop her. If anything, he was aware enough to be grateful for it.

"Thanks," he said, shaking his head as if he was trying to physically clear it. "Just when you think you're getting used to this..."

There was honestly no getting used to it. He took a couple of deep breaths to try settling himself down. For now, it looked like they were clear for a few moments. That was something of a relief because the storm was also making it harder for Keith to keep up than what he was used to.

[cactusy]

"Shit happens," she mutters, looking impassively down at the zombie man before swinging her pole hard at his head one last time, definitively cracking his skull. There. Now she's done.

"Where are you headed to?"

[tempredmental]

Keith squeezed his eyes shut as she did that. It wasn't that he didn't understand. He did. He just was having trouble seeing it right now. Of all the people around them, all the people this storm was throwing at him, this one hit him the most because he was actually dead in Keith's life back home.

It was a lot to deal with.

"I was, um..." He pulled himself out of those thoughts, and glanced around for a second to regain his bearings. "That way." He gestured in the direction he'd been going. He didn't have a specific destination. It was more about finding stragglers and helping people who weren't fighters get to safety.

[cactusy]

She doesn't question the answer; it's the kind of thing she would have said if asked, too, and for very similar reasons. Instead, she gives him a sharp nod, and turns to head off - glancing back to make sure that he's following.

"I won't ask who that guy was," she says, "but if he shows up again, are you gonna have trouble taking care of it?"

Because if so, he really should have an escort.